How local listings help your SEO
You’re more than likely familar with local listings, as they show up in the search results whenever you search for a business in your area. These are vital for contractors because they inform searchers about your services, your service areas, hours of operation and important business updates. Some examples of local listings are: Google My Business, Yelp, Nextdoor, and Better Business Bureau. These matter for your business because search engines rely on local listings to determine if a business is relevant in their searchers’ area.
I was hungry when I was writing this post so we are going to be using this snippet to outline how local listings benefit businesses that operate in a specific area.
1.) More visibility and traffic
By providing accurate information about your business across multiple listings, search engines start to take notice and list you higher in search results. This leads to more visibility as you are seen easier, and being seen easier leads to more calls and clicks. The top 4 businesses that show up in this search are classified in what we sometimes call the ‘map pack’ this is where you want to be. The more people have to click to find you, your opportunity of having them call or click on your website diminishes.
2.) Engage your customer and increase trust
As a contractor, listings allow you to win over your customer before they visit your website by showing off your workmanship (photos) and your credibility via customer reviews. You can also engage your customers by displaying answers to customer questions and responding to customer reviews. You can post updates to your business such as promotions, service offerings, service areas, hours of operations and more.
3.) Credible backlinks
Backlinks are critical to your SEO efforts because they connect your business to credible sources. Having you linked to Better Business Bureau, Nextdoor, Yelp and other listing sources signifies your relevance and credibility to search engines, which helps you appear higher in results. This also helps funnel into review generation as being linked to multiple listings allow you to gain reviews from multiple websites, which further builds credibility in the eyes of your customers because it shows that your company’s reputation is easily accessible and consistent across multiple listings.
To summarize, local listings help you communicate to search engine users in your area. It’s not enough to just have a website, you need to also display your business and services in places where people are actively searching like Google. Listings are just one of many ways Odyssey Marketing Group helps contractors get discovered. Stay tuned for future articles about SEO.
